Latest news with #InformationAge
Washington Post
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Why the Silver Surfer is the superhero for our cosmically fraught times
In a world plagued by too many problems, how to explain the problem of too many superheroes? It's no cosmic riddle: Low-imagination Hollywood power people keep wasting money and mindshare overpopulating every last screen with comic book mesomorphs whose collective strategy for saving this world predominantly involves returning us to the familiarity of childhood. Biff, bang, pow! Sometimes it's fun. The rest of the time, it's annoying — in part because there's only ever been one comic book superhero truly capable of rescuing us from the loneliness of the information age.
Hans India
22-06-2025
- Business
- Hans India
The Third Eye: Moving from Information Age to ‘Age of Intelligence'
New Delhi: The success of Information Technology revolution caused the transition of the world from the Industrial Age to the Age of Information but the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expediting another transformational shift- from the Information Age to the Age of Intelligence propelled by the basic fact that 'all intelligence is information but all information is not intelligence'. This shift is compelled by the reality that there was no competitive gain from having information that everybody else also had and that it is the ownership of 'exclusive knowledge' called Intelligence that gave one advantage over the others. AI applications are becoming a means of generating and accessing such knowledge largely through Data Analytics. Any information of intelligence value has to be 'reliable' but also 'futuristic' in the sense that it indicates the 'opportunities' and 'risks' lying ahead and thus opens the pathway to gainful action. To the extent a system of algorithms can be put in place to produce 'insights' during the analysis of data, this came closer to bridging the gap between 'Artificial' and 'Human' intelligence. Fundamentally, however, AI was an 'assistant' for and not a 'substitute' for human intelligence. Someone rightly said that Artificial Intelligence backed by Large Language Models(LLMs) can become the ultimate repository of human knowledge but even when it might be able to decide what was 'factually true or false' it could not take the stewardship of determining what is 'right or wrong'. This can only be done by the human mind that is equipped with 'intuition' rooted in conscience, piety and a capacity to think for the future. The power of logic -another singular feature of the human mind- derives from a combination of past experience, the capacity to observe and analyse information and the ability to see things in a 'cause and effect' mode. To a limited extent 'logic' can be built into the 'machine learning' but only in a borrowed way. Moreover, human conduct is often conditioned by the 'system of moral values' followed at the personal level- biases and wishful thinking are often built into any system of morality- and this is yet another area where Artificial Intelligence would not be able to substitute the human mind. AI essentially works on data in the memory and the Language Models enhance its outreach to demographies and customs bringing it somewhat closer to human behaviour but what stands out in all of this is the fact that AI cannot be freed from the 'input-output' principle. Albert Einstein famously said that 'imagination was more important than knowledge'- he was not referring to the trait of wildly imagining things that some people might have but was defining the human capacity to see beyond the data in front and perceive what lay ahead. In a way, he was alluding to the ability of the human mind not to 'miss the wood for the tree'. Imagination and human feedback are great assets in both business and personal lives and they mark out human intelligence from the machine-led operation. They both are of great help in the areas of Customer Relations Management- since they made it possible to personalise this relationship -as well as Risk Assessment which no successful enterprise could do without. It is important to know the difference between 'intelligence' that tests the reach of the human mind and 'machine learning' that has its own boundaries. Intelligence by definition is information that gives you an indication of 'what lies ahead' -Artificial Intelligence is therefore going to buy its importance from its capacity to produce 'predictive' readings. AI has the limitation of being able to only read 'patterns' in the data examined by it and if the data was about the footprints left behind in the public domain by the 'adversary' or the 'competitor', this could enable data analytics to throw light at least on the 'modus operandi' of the opponent and indicate how the latter would possibly move next. There is a partial application of 'logic' here though not of 'imagination' which was an exclusive trait of the human mind. If AI cannot be a substitute for human intelligence the best use of it is in making it an 'assistant' for the latter and this is precisely what explains the phenomenal advancement of AI in professional and business fields. A 'symbiotic relationship' between the two guarantees a bright future for humanity at large. Data analytics can aim at bringing out trends relating to the business environment, the study of the competitors and the organisation's internal situation. It can focus on the examination of the specific requirements of a particular business, organisational entity and profession, in a bid to seek a legitimate competitive advantage. AI is strengthening the 'knowledge economy' by helping to evolve new services and products, by making things more efficient through cost-cutting and optimal utilisation of the available workforce and by generally improving the 'quality of life' by encouraging innovation. The constant change of the business scene because of the shifting paradigms of knowledge, establishes that any AI application will not be a one-time event and will further advance the cause of research and development. The determination of the 'direction' of an AI operation, however, will remain with the human mind and this placed a fundamental limitation on AI. As the field of Al gets enlarged, two things are emerging as major concerns- the challenge of establishing the reliability of the data banks used and the likely use of AI for unethical and criminal objectives. In the age of fake news and misinformation on social media, only verified information must be used for AI applications. Confirming the reliability of data is by itself a task for AI that would create value for business. India as a matter of policy favours international oversight of AI research in the interest of transparency for safeguarding the general good. The US thinks of AI development purely as an economic instrument and wants to preserve ownership rights in research and innovation. At the strategic level, AI has the potential for providing new tools of security and intelligence and in the process, can become a source of threat for the geopolitical stability of the world itself. India has rightly taken the lead in demanding the ethical advancement of AI for the good of humanity and called for a collective approach to minimising the 'perils' of AI while promoting its progress for universal causes. It is instructive to note that the recent joint winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics- John J Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey E Hinton of the University of Toronto- are pioneers in the field of modern 'machine learning' research and they have both warned that AI had the potential to cause 'apocalypse' for humanity. (The writer is a former Director Intelligence Bureau)
Buzz Feed
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
What People Ate In Medieval France — Recreated With AI
Hail fellows! Prithee, take a gander at this bounty, a fare ramble througheth meals of ages gone by... Okay, I can't keep up this medieval speak, but I do love the vibes. And as a food writer, I LOVE thinking about what and how people ate in other time periods. In culinary school, I learned all about the stale bread once used as plates called "trenchers" and the heavy-handed seasoning used to mask the stench of rotting meat — both staples of medieval European dining. But I could never quite picture what an actual medieval dinner looked like (beyond the overly dramatic portrayals in movies like Sleeping Beauty or A Knight's Tale)... until now. Using a quintessential product of the Information Age, generative AI, I can finally actually conceive of some of the wildest medieval dishes I'd only ever read about. Using Le Viandier de Taillevent, one of the oldest French cookbooks out there, I recreated historically accurate images based on recipes for a 14th-century banquet at the royal court in Paris. For this food history geek, the results were SO. FASCINATING. Feasts at 14th-century French courts didn't have courses as we think of them — or forks — but they did have plenty of meat... The upper echelons of the era LOVED eating birds — especially when they symbolized royalty and opulence as peacocks did. French royals stunted on their dinner guests with an elaborate bird dish called "armed* peacock": Le Viandier instructs the cook to: "Blow them, scald them, slit them along the belly, skin them, and remove the carcasses. Roast the carcasses on a spit and glaze them (while turning) with batter of beaten egg white and egg yolk. Remove them from the spit, let them cool, and (if you wish) clothe them in their skin. Have little wooden skewers put in the neck to hold it upright as if it were alive. At a feast, serve in the second translation specifies seasonings: "add cloves and for two plates, an ounce of powder and small spices: seeds, cloves, long pepper, nutmeg and two ounces of cinnamon ground into powder and then take a pint of rose water and a pint of vinegar and put under the roast..."*armed — refers to the bird being "redressed" in its feathers and presented at a feast to look like the bird in its living state. Wowza. How do you take your lark? Yes, the cute little songbird was a mainstay of Middle Age banquet halls. This is how the royal chef prepared them: "For the larks. Take the larks and make them suffer*, and put veal in a pot with them to get the best broth. Then, take some bread and season it, and put it in beef broth and mix it with the livers and bread to strain. When it is strained, you will put everything together in the pot. Take cinnamon, ginger, fine spices, and greens."*make them suffer — This likely refers simply to butchering the bird. But what a way to phrase it. Brutal. For the grandest of all feasts, the dishes had to be just as blinged out as the guests, as evidenced by this recipe for Gilded Chickens with Quenelles: "After the chicken is killed, break a bit of skin on the head, take a feather tube, blow in until it is very full of air, scald it, slit it along the belly, skin it, and put the carcass aside. For the stuffing and the quenelles, have some raw pork... some chicken meat, eggs, good fine powder, pine nut paste, and currants... Stuff the chicken skins with it (but do not fill them so much that they burst), restitch them, and boil them in a pan... When the quenelles are well made, put them to cook with the chickens... on slender spoon an egg batter on top of your chickens and quenelles, until they are glazed... Take some gold or silver leaf and wrap it."In my head, this is what Elon Musk has every night for dinner. Wanna cook thousands of *actually* delicious recipes in step-by-step mode — with helpful videos? Download the free Tasty app right now. Today, we have Croque Madame, back in the day they had Sauce Madame, which is — you guessed it — not at all like the sandwich we know and love: "To make Sauce Madame, roast a goose and place a pan underneath. Take the liver of a lamb or other poultry and roast it on the grill. Then, when it is cooked, toast it and soak it in a little broth, and pass it through a cheesecloth. Boil a dozen eggs. Take the yolks and finely chop them. Then, when the meat is cooked, place it on top and add the sauce. If you want to taste milk, add a drop or two to the boil."This dish won the award for "Most Appetizing" of the meat course for me... that's saying something. While a young cow's intestines might not sound like a good time to you, it was the talk of the dinner party circa 1345. Here's how they made it back in the day: "To make calf mesentery, that one calls 'charpie.' Take your meat when it is completely cooked, cut it up very small, and fry it in lard. Crush ginger and saffron. Beat some raw eggs, and thread them onto your meat in the lard. Crush spices and add some."These dishes were heavy on the spice for more than just flavor: spices were expensive imports that communicated to everyone at the party just how good the hosts had it. It's giving caviar. As if this meal wasn't pungent enough, let's add some seafood to the mix... Lemprey is a fish — one that looks more like a sandworm from Dune than an earthly edible thing. And yes, Middle Age nobles ate it stuffed and covered in gelatin: "Lamprey in galantine. Bleed it... keep the blood, and cook it in vinegar, wine, and a bit of water. When it is cooked, put it to cool on a cloth. Take grilled bread, steep in your broth, [strain] through cheesecloth, boil with the blood, and stir well so that it does not burn. When it is well boiled, pour it into a mortar or a clean basin and stir continually until it is cooled. Grind ginger, cassia flowers, cloves, grains of paradise, nutmeg, and long pepper, steep in your broth, put as before into a basin with your fish, and put the basin in a wooden or tin dish. Thus, you have a good galantine."Thus, you have a dish that makes my skin crawl. Honestly wasn't expecting to read a recipe for dolphin in this cookbook, but at this point, I am way past getting shocked with these dishes: All our 600-year-old text says is, "Dolphins, lily flowers, star of creams, fried with sugar and egg yolks."Right. Riiiight. I'm detecting a slight mistranslation... it has been 600 years, after all. Based on Le Viandier, the French were not too worried about getting their veggies in. Mustard soup is one of the few vegetarian dishes in the cookbook: "To make mustard soup... take eggs fried in lily or butter and then puree mustard, cinnamon, ginger, small spices such as cloves and garlic, and sugar, all together, boil in a pot, and remove any excess greens and taste with salt as appropriate and put the broth aside." And, a French banquet isn't really complete without dessert... Did you know the All-American apple pie has a medieval French cousin? Me neither! Surely, this simple apple tart is going to be simple, spiced, and sweet: "Apple tarts: apple pieces, figs and grapes, well-cleaned, and put among the apples and figs & all mixed together. Here is put an onion fried in butter or in wine... crushed apples and destemmed apples in wine... with saffron... a few small spices: cinnamon, white ginger, anise... all the ingredients put together very crushed by hand [into] a paste well thick with apples and other ingredients.. After it is put the lid... gilded with saffron and put in the oven & cooked."No, ya, they put onions in apple pie. Of course, they did that. Hath your 21st-century tastes found this medieval feast scrumptious or stomach-churning? Tell us in the comments and share the other historical cuisines you're curious to learn more about. Want to see what people are cooking in the 21st century? Download the free Tasty app for access to thousands of contemporary recipes — no subscription required. This post was enhanced using AI-powered creativity tools.
CBC
16-05-2025
- Health
- CBC
The internet is full of misinformation. That's by design, experts say
This current time period we're in has been called the Information Age, and it's easy to see why. This year, the global amount of data generated is expected to reach 181 zettabytes — or 181 trillion gigabytes — up from just two zettabytes in 2010. Some studies say that there is now more data out there than there are stars in the observable universe. But all this information comes at a cost. "We're living at a time that I've categorized as a knowledge crisis," says University of Alberta law professor Tim Caulfield. "We have access to more information now than ever before in human history ... despite that, we've never been more misled, more confused." A 2023 Statistics Canada survey said 43 per cent of Canadians feel that it's getting harder to decipher what's true and what's fake online — and that was even before the rise of AI and deepfakes. Several recent scientific studies have attempted to quantify just how much of this information is actually real. "Our information environment is completely manipulated, and often people don't realize the degree to which that is the case," said Caulfield. Analyzing TikTok, Amazon, and search engines In a 2024 study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, Caulfield and his colleagues looked at the quality of books about cancer on Amazon. "We found 49 per cent of the books had misleading content in it, and some of it was just completely atrocious," said Caulfield. They also found that on the first page of results on Amazon, 70 per cent of the content was misleading. "And once again, sometimes just hardcore bunk," he adds. A study published in March, led by University of British Columbia PhD student Vasileia Karasavva, took aim at health information presented on TikTok. The researchers analyzed the top 100 TikTok videos by view count that mentioned ADHD, and shared them with clinical psychologists working with ADHD patients, who reported that half the videos contained some sort of misinformation. "We sort of saw that a lot of this information didn't match up with the diagnostic criteria," said Karasavva. "They were presenting things that have more to do with normal human behaviour as symptoms of ADHD." The team also looked at the creators themselves, and found that half of them stood to make financial gain from this content, posting direct sales links to supposed cures. Everybody is fighting for your attention, and that makes all of us vulnerable. - University of British Columbia psychologist Friedrich Götz In another study from March, Tulane University assistant professor Eugina Leung investigated how results on search engines like Google, Bing and ChatGPT differ depending on the search terms used. "What we find is that people tend to use search terms that lean toward what they already believe is true," said Leung. "Imagine, we asked participants to search for health effects of caffeine. If they believe that caffeine is quite likely to be harmful, then they're more likely to come up with search terms like dangers of caffeine, caffeine side effects, caffeine health risks." These narrow search terms, Leung said, mean that the users are just receiving results that are tied to their beliefs. "When we try to search for information online, a lot of times we actually are looking to learn something new," said Leung. "With the design of a narrow search engines and also our tendency to come up with a narrow search term, the combination of this means that we're often not actually learning something new." 'We are all susceptible' A 2024 paper by computer scientist Boleslaw Szymansky, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, argues that we should consider our information space as part of our natural environment — and acknowledge just how badly it's being polluted by this "data smog." Our inability to decipher what's true and what's false online is limiting people's capacity to evaluate information and make timely decisions, the authors write, and cites research that suggests this costs the U.S. economy over a trillion dollars annually due to lost productivity. "We live in a time where the attention economy is dictating a lot of our experiences. So everybody is fighting for your attention," says University of British Columbia psychologist Friedrich Götz. "And that makes all of us vulnerable." In his research, Götz wanted to understand who was most susceptible to false information online. In a global study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences in March, Götz and his team asked over 66,000 participants to discern between fake headlines and real ones. Most people did poorly. "The biggest takeaway is that nobody is immune," he said. But the study found certain groups were more susceptible than others. This includes women, people with lower levels of education, people who lean conservative politically, and Gen Z. He points to education, and specifically the development and practicing of critical thinking skills, as being a defining factor in who fell for fake news more often. Caulfield echoes the need for more critical thinking skills to help people navigate information in the attention economy, and suggests something as simple as taking a moment to stop and process information can often help. "I think that's because it creates this break between your initial emotional response to the content and it allows, even for that moment, your rational mind to kick in." Researchers also point to other mitigation strategies in the works, such the University of Cambridge's Bad News Game and other programs that walk people through the mechanics of manipulation. There's also Concordia University's SmoothDetector, which harnesses AI and algorithms to parse through the data smog to find misinformation. "We are now at a stage where I think the interventions could be implemented at scale. They have been tested," said Götz.
Los Angeles Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
How Judy Blume's books became a hot commodity in Hollywood, 50 years later
When Mara Brock Akil was a little girl, she voraciously read Judy Blume. Looking back, she sees her obsession as the start of her becoming a writer. So when Akil heard that Blume was allowing her work to be translated to the screen, she was ready: 'My little girl hand just shot up, 'I want to do that!'' says Akil. She adds that while this generation's youth can search the internet for information — and, sometimes, misinformation — Blume was her own trusted source. 'The Information Age linked us and let us see things that we weren't able to see or know, and Judy was that for us,' says Akil. 'Judy was writing from a place that was really grounded and gave full humanity to young people and their lives. She took their lives seriously.' Akil has channeled her affection for Blume's work into a new adaptation of the author's 1975 novel 'Forever...,' which premiered Thursday on Netflix. Focused on two teens falling in love, the book contains sex scenes that placed it on banned lists from its inception — and Blume, whose work offers frank discussion of subjects like masturbation and menstruation, remains no stranger to banned book lists, despite selling more than 90 million books worldwide. But as censorship ramps up again, Blume has become something of a hot commodity in Hollywood. In addition to the documentary 'Judy Blume Forever,' a feature film based on her novel 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' was released in 2023, an adaptation of 'Summer Sisters' is in development at Hulu and an animated film based on 'Superfudge' is in the works at Disney+. Akil's 'Forever,' set in 2018 Los Angeles, stars Michael Cooper Jr. and Lovie Simone as the teenage leads — though the roles are gender-swapped from the novel. In 2020, while Akil was developing the adaptation, she tried to think of who the most vulnerable person is in society. 'I posit that the Black boy is the most vulnerable,' she says. 'My muse is my oldest son, and through the portal of him I got to go into the generation and just really start to look at what was going on.' While working on the project, she realized there are few depictions of boys and young men whose story is anchored in love, rather than relegating love to a side plot. 'Mentally, emotionally, physically — they too deserve to fall in love and be desired and have someone fall in love with them,' she says. 'And for Keisha — his honesty was attractive to her. How often do we ever really see that level of vulnerability be the leading guy?' In true Blume style, Akil also incorporated a central issue affecting people today — technology. 'The phone is a big character in the show, because there's a lot of duality to the phone,' she says. Throughout the series, the characters use phones to connect and disconnect via blocked messages, lost voicemails and unfinished texts. In the premiere, the drama revolves around the dreaded disappearing ellipsis — that feeling when you can see someone typing and then it stops. Akil laughs when I bring it up: 'At any age, that ellipsis will kick your butt.' And when you add sex into the mix, everything becomes more charged. 'The phone in the modern times is an extension of pleasure in sexuality, when used in a trusting way, and then it can be weaponized,' says Akil. 'It can be so damaging to this generation's future at a time in which mistakes are inherent in their development.' It's this keen awareness that the mistakes haven't changed but the consequences have that grounds Akil's version of 'Forever.' 'There's a lot of real fear out there and real tough choices that parents are going through,' says Akil. 'And in this era of mistakes, kids can make a mistake and die by exploring drugs or —' She stops herself. 'I get very emotional about the state of young people and their inability to make a mistake,' she says, 'because I think most young people are actually making good choices.' Akil says Blume and her family have seen the episodes more than once and told the showrunner she really enjoyed them. Akil remembers first meeting Blume. 'I was nervous. I wanted to be seen by her,' she says. 'I fangirled out and she allowed it and then was, like, sit your soul down. We had a conversation, and it felt destined and magical. I was grateful that she listened, and it allowed me to come to the table saying, 'I know how to translate this.'' I ask Akil why she thinks Blume's work continues to resonate, lasting for decades in its original form and spawning new projects to attract the next generation of viewers and, hopefully, readers. 'She's relevant because she dared to tell us the truth,' says Akil. 'And the truth is forever.'
